On March 30th of next year, the film industry in this country hits a major crossroads. On that day, which will be either a particularly happy one, or a devastatingly sad one for me personally, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles hits theaters. It is on that day, that America will decide once and for all if technology is a benefit to the film industry.

In this new installment of the Teenage Mutant Ninja saga, the movie is entirely digitally animated. I'm sure it's going to look OK, but the characters themselves are almost like superheroes in the way they move. Just judging from the trailer, they are jumping impossible distances, leaping from rooftop to rooftop and jumping from a building to the the street. I just think that the TMNT live action movies were unbeatable.

That there's a link to the premier Maasai hip hop group in Tanzania. The Maasai are a tribe known for their refusal to abandon tradition (my friend drank blood out of a goat's chest cavity with them last year) despite the globalization of the region around them. I wonder what the average Maasai thinks about X Plastaz; whether they serve as an empowering force for youth (or at least women) stifled by Maasai culture, or an unwelcome trend diluting the authenticity of traditional Maasai music.

David sent me a link to some horrible waterpolo music video which made me want to barf. It was hardcore serbian rab or something, but the fact that David thinks it's cool is what's really barf-worthy. I like waterpolo, but I make it a personal point to not let David think he is cool.

If you are interested in seeing some almost-naked men clawing at eachother while 3 other white guys spit lyrics into the camera, be my guest.

Anyhow, pissed off that David might think he was cool; maybe even cooler than me, I searched YouTube in hopes to find some cool music video where horses jumped big things or something. I had no luck finding such video (minus 1 for YouTube), even though I found a TON of awful horse music videos like this one. So i sent that to David.

I had a thought while watching O Brother Where Art Thou?. It was about executions. I don't usually daydream about such horrific things, but sometimes I do. Anyways, O Brother takes place in a time when many executions were public. Not only were official executions public much of the time, there were often lynch mobs and other sorts of groups who would execute people in public. I wonder, if there was a public execution these days, on the 5Cs for example, if anyone would watch it. Would it matter who the person was? If the execution was perceived by most people as justified. I started thinking about all this because of Saddam Hussein.

Oh please. I just read that the American government -- no doubt, in conjunction with the campaign to do away with condoms -- is now pushing circumcision on the rest of the world. This is really funny. We're the only country that mutilates the majority of our penises for non-religious reasons. Circumcision is an artifact of the 1870s, when an ignorant medical culture, dominated by American Medical Association heavyweights like Rhode Island Leutenant Health Commissioner Charles Chapin, who claimed that it was "more important to remove adenoids from the child that it is to remove ashes from the back yard; Georgian hero-surgeon Robert Battey, who performed ovariotomies and clitoridectomies on hundreds of women to alleviate symptoms as varied as backache, anxiety, depression and female hysteria (possibly the biggest joke ever: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female_hysteria); and Lewish Sayre, who circumsized hundreds of young boys who suffered from paralysis, lunacism, brass poisoning and just about every other mental or physiological condition you can think of, not to mention the social diseases of homosexuality and excessive masturbation, with appallingly low success rates and an enormous following of doctors hungry to perform easy, lucrative procedures.

When I woke up I thought a little bit about the various dystopian worlds I'd read about in my youth, and how most of them are stable mainly because they keep all their citizens on drugs. Obviously, in the US we have Prozac-type drugs and Ritalin-type drugs to keep everyone in line. Then I went to Quiznos and forgot about that.
Well, just now I checked Google News and saw an article about antidepressants causing depression and suicide (http://today.reuters.co.uk/news/articlenews.aspx?type=healthNews&storyID=2006-12-13T232736Z_01_N12361095_RTRIDST_0_HEALTH-ANTIDEPRESSANTS-SUICIDE-DC.XML&WTmodLoc=SciHealth-C1-Headline-2), which reminded me of the kid on acne meds who flew a plane into a bank shortly after 9-11 and everyone thought it was a terrorist attack instead of just some poor guy whose brain was wrecked by prescription drugs. Then I checked the blog and saw racinian's entry about suicide, "the number 2 cause of death of college students, claiming 1,100 lives a year," and I said to myself, "huh... suicide's a pretty hot item this time of year."

Last night. It was so great. I was in this really awesome dystopia where every place seemed like an airport. People were waiting in long lines everywhere to go through open, seemingly doors, despite the dozens of identical doors, without lines, leading to the same rooms. Language was simplified, and no one said much of anything, anyway. I asked a woman behind a desk what was going on, where I was, what had happened, etc, and she said something like, "we're not supposed to argue," turned around and walked away.
I probably had this dream because I spent much of last night reading about, well, pretty much exactly what I dreamed about: enormously powerful governments (Chinese, American) that control every aspect of life.

So those British princes are really cashing in on the 10-year anniversary of Princess Diana's death. I guess their better-publicized action is a memorial concert that should net at least six million dollars, without even considering advertising. Interestingly, they're also releasing some pictures of Diana's gruesome death. Personally, I find it a little strange, but I guess princes can do pretty much whatever they want.
It's good, I guess. It will stimulate the growth of enormous companies and put a little food on the tables of billionaire musicians. It's really what she would have wanted. Next year they should have a memorial concert for Gandhi.

Has finally been paroled! We should have a party, no joke. He has hepatitis C and diabetes, and his lawyer claims he'll be dead in a matter of months. He's expressed remorse: "Legally it was wrong. It was an infraction of the law," and vows never to facilitate another suicide.
The thing is, people have no rights these days. Every single time anyone expresses suicidal thoughts, it's a huge emergency. Kids get suspended, folks get fired, so-called "friends" and "family" get mad. Why can't I just commit suicide without everyone interfering?
:-*